What if we have been looking for the wrong qualities in teachers?
What if test scores matter no more than non-cognitive behaviors, skills, and learnings?
Kirabo Jackson of Northwestern University has published a study showing that test scores may not be the most important measure of teaching.
Consider the findings of this North Carolina study in 2012:
This paper presents a model where teacher effects on long-run outcomes reflect effects on both cognitive skills (measured by test-scores) and non-cognitive skills (measured by non-test-score outcomes). In administrative data, teachers have causal effects on test-scores and student absences, suspensions, grades, and on-time grade progression. Teacher effects on a weighted average of these non-test score outcomes (a proxy for non-cognitive skills) predict teacher effects on dropout, high-school completion, and college-entrance-exam taking above and beyond their effects on test scores. Accordingly, test-score effects alone fail to identify excellent teachers and may understate the importance of teachers for longer-run outcomes.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We’ve always known that for the largest part test scores are meaningless and so much more which can’t be scored on a multiple choice test is much more important to growing up as a critical thinking, creative, and empathic human being, but too many have slipped into denial while we watched our nation dive into corrupted practices.
LikeLike
Data supportive evidence for those who need it. Students, teachers, and parents already know that.
LikeLike
yes. but aren’t they trying to measure this as well? grit would be considered a non-cognitive skill?
LikeLike
Why do we even need a “study”. The LOVE OF LEARNING, that education is a road, not a destination, a lifelong enterprise should be apparent to any thinking individual. Sadly, as one English philosopher stated, he got by by thinking just once a year. We have educators, teachers, and instructors. What is wanted now is instructors who stuff the little widgets with preconceived, politically correct “truths”. The science teacher in today’s blog is a perfect example of strictured “thinking” by the “experts”.
LikeLike
Gordon, the development of a national teaching force will enable training for the future to eliminate any need for education.
REmber these quotes from Mr Jefferson:
1818 August 4. “The objects of this primary eduction determine its character and limits. These objects are To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts, in writing; To improve by reading, his morals and faculties; To understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either; To know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains; to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor and judgement; And, in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed. To instruct the mass of our citizens in these, their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens, being then the objects of education in the primary schools, whether privet or public, in them should be taught reading, writing and numerical arithmetic, the elements of mensuration…and the outlines of geography and history.”
1820 September 28. (to William C. Jarvis) “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their controul with a wholsome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. this is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
LikeLike
Profoundly sage of Jefferson. If his criteria are applied, the public schools have indeed failed the country over the last 30 years. The election of Obama, TWICE no less, is evidence. Not sure that the same shouldn’t be said for G. Bush.
I’m supporting Ted Cruz, but will the Republicans be smart enough to nominate him, and the country to elect him? Not likely.
Jeb Bush Vs. Hillary. Shudder, shudder, shudder. I lay it at the feet of the ignorant electorate, and I lay that ignorance at the feet of the present public school teaching cadre, members of which who attack me here serve to well illustrate and almost prove my thesis.
LikeLike
I notice that this paper is a “working paper,” meaning not peer-reviewed. Can we get a source that is peer-reviewed? Why are so many academic papers on education classified as “working papers”?
LikeLike
While I understand Jackson’s message, I will repeat that any categorization of a human characteristic is a social construct — we make categories up like cognitive/non-cognitive to be able to talk about different human qualities.The problem arises when institutions, in pursuing institutional goals (accreditation, diplomas, etc.), reduce to these categories to some quantitative measure (which again is a human construct), and then rank order those characteristics. Cognitive measures is just code for “traits” that those who run institutions believe can be most easily measured with some for of testing instrument —as if that number really reflects the descriptors invented for each number (e.g. gifted). The only reason I keep harping on this issue, is the danger that educators debate/discuss/argue over matters who assumptions professional educators should not be buying into. I thought at one time that winning the IQ debate would end this senseless pursuit of measuring human beings internal states—but educators keep arguing with “reformers” over numbers that are assumed to emerge out of some Platonic cave instead of Pearson’s office of measurement.
LikeLike